Matt Rife Already Blaming the Audience in the Trailer for His New Netflix Special

Well, that didn’t take long. In the first 10 seconds of the trailer for Matt Rife’s new Netflix special, Lucid, the comic lets the audience know that it will have to hold up its end of the bargain. “This is just me and you guys. I don’t know what you or I will say,” he declares, setting up the hour to come. “I want you to be aware you are equally as at fault for how this goes as I am.”

If the new special tanks, in other words, we now know where to point the finger. Rife isn’t exactly Mr. Take Responsibility. When he outraged viewers in his last special with jokes about domestic violence, he suggested special-needs helmets for anyone with hurt feelings. After all, he reasoned, “I didn’t hit anybody.”

To be fair to Rife, Lucid does require a lot of audience participation. The show will be made up entirely of crowd work, the comic skill that catapulted Rife and his well-defined cheekbones to fame on TikTok. Filling an entire hour out of simple bantering with audience members? That takes some nerve as Rife will be making up comedy on the spot. 

Or does it? Gary Gulman does a bit in his latest special about the “art” of crowd work. If any comic ever singled him out as an audience member, Gulman planned to stand and protest: “I didn’t come here to be forcibly cast in your TikTok video, you lazy hack.” What he’s essentially saying is that making fun of paying customers is a poor substitute for the hard work of actually writing jokes.

Rife has heard the criticism before and, judging from last year’s Natural Selection special, it bugs the crap out of him. He ended his Netflix debut with a “screw the haters” diatribe: “I’m just doing what I think is funny, and all I can hope to come from that is that it makes other people smile, and it makes them happy. That’s all I ever want to come from any of this. So who cares if absolutely nobody believes in you, man. Fuck these people. For 12 years, nobody believed in me, man. And if I let that affect how I respected my own thoughts and ideas, I wouldn’t be doing a Netflix special at Constitution Hall in my favorite city in the entire country, man.”

Rife then thrusted his microphone into the air, man. “But what do I know? I only do crowd work, right?” With a drop of the mic, the comic had made his point — he could write jokes after all! At least for one special, anyway.

Rife doesn’t save the defensiveness for the special this time — it’s featured in the one-minute trailer: “Next time you guys see some haters in my comments going, ‘All he does is crowd work, it’s so easy.’ Is it? Is it the easiest (bleep) I could ever do? Is it just handed to me? No!”

The thing is, valid criticism about Rife relying on crowd work is pretty inside baseball, a snarky conversation that could only exist among the dorkiest comedy nerds. Most Rife fans would be oblivious to the critique except for the fact that the comic insists on telling us how it hurts his feelings in each of his Netflix specials. 

Just a thought — maybe a safety helmet could make it all better?